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Episode: When Vaginas Attack!

Author: Spotify Studios
Duration: 00:33:09

Episode Shownotes

[VIDEO available on Spotify.] Imagine a vagina. You might be thinking of a passive tube, patiently waiting for a penis to shoot out sperm — and you wouldn't be alone. From Aristotle to Darwin, tons of prominent nerds classified males as the active sexual players: They're coercing, manipulating and harassing

to reproduce, while the females are passive, coy, chaste. But animal ecologist Dr. Tiana Pirtle is here to give us the real story. Because once scientists started investigating what really goes on in the vaginas of the animal queendom, they realized that — far from being docile tubes — vaginas are packed with their own weaponry, tools and secret chambers. It turns out that both penises and vaginas were allowed to fight in the evolutionary arms race. Pirtle breaks open a box filled with animal vaginas to tell us all about it. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsWhenVaginasAttack In this episode, we cover: (00:00) A Box Full of Vaginas (02:42) The 'Chaste' Female is Born (06:51) The Duck Vagina that Launched a Thousand Ships (11:06) Hyenas and their Pseudo Penises (13:23) Water Striders and their Genital Shields (16:53) Snakes and their Two Vaginas?! (20:28) Alpacas and their Regal Vaginas (25:31) The Rainbow of Vaginas This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman with help from Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, and Ekedi Fauster-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Michelle Dang. Video Editing Kait Plum. Additional editing help from Alex Button. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Thanks to Dr. Patricia Brennan, Dr. Andy Flies, Dr. Chang Han, Prof. Christine Drea, Samuel Cox and Nick Johnson. We first heard about Tiana's show at Beaker Street Festival in Tasmania. Also a big thanks to the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you are listening on Spotify, follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. And if you like the show - please give us a five star review – it really helps new people find the show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:07 Speaker_02
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, animal sex, why so much that we've been taught about it is wrong.

00:00:16 Speaker_02
The story that seems to have stuck in our heads about how animals have sex is that the male with their spear-like willy plunges into a passive vagina. But it turns out that the truth is so much more complicated and so much more fun.

00:00:34 Speaker_02
So to tell us all about this is Dr. Tiana Pirtle at the University of Tasmania. Hi. Hi. Thanks for having me. And you should really watch this on video, which you can if you're watching this on Spotify, because Tiana brought props. Yes.

00:00:49 Speaker_00
What's in the box? Well, this very, very special box is full of different animal vaginas. I may require a stabby implement. Yes, not a penis to open The box?

00:01:08 Speaker_02
Oh my gosh. I've never been sent a box with animal vaginas. Oops, and I might have just destroyed your pencil. Or your pen a little bit. That's fine. That's what today's episode's all about, isn't it? Whoa, whoa, whoa. What's coming out?

00:01:19 Speaker_00
What's coming out? Who've we got here? Well, meet the family. Yes, let's see. We've got the alpaca, common dolphin, couple rattlesnakes, dogfish shark, harbour porpoise, and a domestic duck.

00:01:34 Speaker_02
Amazing. Oh my God. Okay. So wait, how, wait, that looks like a penis. How is this a vagina?

00:01:39 Speaker_00
So these are all the internal negative space inside the vaginas. So how did they make them? So how these got made was an animal died and the vagina was excised from the body and then filled with a silicone. So it created this mold of what is inside.

00:02:04 Speaker_00
The space that would be inside.

00:02:06 Speaker_02
Okay, yes, yes, that makes sense.

00:02:08 Speaker_00
So the penis is going inside.

00:02:09 Speaker_02
So this is inside.

00:02:10 Speaker_00
Yes. So there's some animals with multiple vaginas, some with corkscrews, vaginal folds, long and thin ones. Thicker, fatter ones.

00:02:23 Speaker_01
The array of vaginas in front of me. The story is clear that both males and females were allowed to participate in the evolutionary arms race.

00:02:33 Speaker_02
And I'm so excited for you to tell us all about it after the break. Welcome back. Today on the show, the wonderful world of animal vaginas. And we're here with Dr. Tiana Pirtle. So welcome back. Let's start from the beginning for you.

00:02:54 Speaker_02
So you were in the middle of a PhD studying evolutionary theories and you started noticing something a bit frustrating in some of the papers that you were reading.

00:03:05 Speaker_00
I just noticed there was quite a difference in the way male animals and female animals were described, especially in terms of reproductive behavior and evolutionary strategies. The males are often described as these very active players.

00:03:25 Speaker_00
They're coercing, manipulating, harassing. And females on the other hand are described in very passive terminology. They're responding, reacting, even like adaptation is what males do and counter adaptations are what females do.

00:03:45 Speaker_00
Wait, what do you mean by that? So the male is adapting all these strategies and she's only relevant compared to what he's doing. And yes, there's an empirical bias in the way Western science has treated female animals.

00:03:59 Speaker_00
Starting with Darwin, but extending even before that. So tell me about that.

00:04:04 Speaker_02
When did this bias begin?

00:04:06 Speaker_00
Well, Aristotle, in fact, has described males as active and females as passive. So it extends all the way back to then, but it really was solidified by Darwin.

00:04:21 Speaker_00
He was developing his theory of sexual selection and sexual selection is the struggle for mates essentially in how animals get mates.

00:04:31 Speaker_00
And he was developing his theory during Victorian England, which as we all know, had some very pernicious views on women and their role in society.

00:04:46 Speaker_00
formed the foundation for how Darwin viewed female animals, describing them as coy and chaste and the thought that- And animal as chaste. Female animal couldn't be promiscuous was unacceptable.

00:05:01 Speaker_00
So they just ignored any sort of examples that would suggest otherwise. And it really, A, gave scientific credence to the patriarchy, but also kind of set

00:05:14 Speaker_00
Western science on this trajectory of focusing on the males, they're doing the interesting things, evolving weaponry and behaviors and tactics. Cool feathers. And cool penises. Yes.

00:05:30 Speaker_00
And the females, on the other hand, are just in the sidelines waiting for the males to do their thing and then working themselves around what the males decide. And the reality is that's not true. at all.

00:05:42 Speaker_02
Okay, so you're reading about all of this, feeling scandalized, frustrated. How would we describe your emotions as you're kind of reckoning with this bias in science?

00:05:53 Speaker_00
I suppose as you train in science, you're kind of given this line that science is objective. We all like to think we're objective observers of the world and we're testing theories in an objective manner, but the reality is, is science is very biased.

00:06:11 Speaker_00
So these models all came from Dr. Patricia Brennan in the US, who's a phenomenal researcher and has made it her life mission to categorize as many animal vaginas as possible, because the line that we often

00:06:25 Speaker_00
think about when it comes to penises and vaginas is that, you know, the penis is doing the thrusting, the ejaculating, and the vagina is just a passive tube sitting there ready to catch the penis and let the sperms go where they need to go.

00:06:41 Speaker_00
But that's not even remotely the case. And they're very diverse in function and form. Let's jump in. Okay, so let's start with the duck. Yes, the duck is the classic example. And this is actually, I think, the vagina that launched a thousand ships.

00:07:01 Speaker_00
Patricia Brennan's line of research started from the duck vagina. From the duck. So this is the duck vagina. And you can see it's corkscrewed.

00:07:14 Speaker_02
Do you feel like you're on a game show? It's corkscrewed. Okay. Yes. Let me look at this. Okay. So science first understood not the duck vagina, but the duck penis.

00:07:26 Speaker_00
Yes. So what does the duck penis look like? Male ducks are quite unusual in the bird world and they have penises. So most birds have cloacas, which are just like multi-orifice holes or multi-purpose holes, and they do a cloacal kiss.

00:07:42 Speaker_00
So the birds just rub it together, transfer the little sperm, and flutter off. But ducks have these giant, fleshy, corkscrew organs that explode out of their body. Really?

00:07:54 Speaker_02
Yes. And it explodes inside her?

00:07:57 Speaker_00
It's like, it's impressive to observe. And like most animals. We've known what the penis looks like for a while. And no one thought to even look at what the vagina might look like that would handle a penis like that. Yes.

00:08:16 Speaker_00
So the male's penis is corkscrewed, while the vagina is also corkscrewed and there's some like little side pockets, like some flaps and stuff.

00:08:26 Speaker_02
Pockets in the vagina.

00:08:28 Speaker_00
Wow. So why does it have all these? The amazing thing is it's corkscrewed in the opposite direction of the penis. So for a long time, and for some animal species, you think the penis and the vagina fit together, like the lock and key hypothesis.

00:08:45 Speaker_00
But this seems to be a vagina that's evolved to not accept the penis, and that's exactly what it can do. So male ducks can be quite coercive, to use a term that's often used to describe male animals. And the sex ratios tend to be skewed.

00:09:03 Speaker_00
There's more males than females and I'll explain why in a second. And that means that not every male gets a female partner for the season. So the males that don't form these little bachelor gangs, roving around, looking for some females.

00:09:20 Speaker_00
And when they find one, they jump on her and force themselves on her and that's why sex ratios can be skewed is that some females end up being killed in this process or harmed. There's pieces exploding everywhere.

00:09:36 Speaker_00
The female can't really do much about it on the outside, but she has her secret weapon, which is her vagina. And if The female doesn't want the penises that are exploding at her.

00:09:46 Speaker_00
She can shift her body around so that the penis tips go into these little side pockets formed by the corkscrew. Or in some species, she can squeeze the muscles around and just fully expel the penis. And it works remarkably well.

00:10:03 Speaker_00
So in some duck species, about 40% of the matings a female will experience are these forced matings. But only two to 5% of the ducklings are fathered by those.

00:10:13 Speaker_02
So of all the matings that she's having, up to 40% of them. In some species. In some species are these forced, um, uh, these sort of gangs of bachelor dogs.

00:10:25 Speaker_01
Bachelor males.

00:10:27 Speaker_02
But then when you look at Who's actually fathering the ducklings? It's only 2-5%?

00:10:32 Speaker_00
Only 2-5% of the ducklings are coming from those. Wow.

00:10:38 Speaker_02
So the rest are from mates that were more consensual that she was into?

00:10:43 Speaker_00
Yeah, or the partner she's chosen for that season or other males she's gone out to solicit matings from.

00:10:50 Speaker_02
How interesting. And so without science having been able to know who was actually fathering these ducklings, you could see why this story would persist.

00:11:00 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's a great example of, you know, when you only look at half the story, you only get half the story.

00:11:06 Speaker_02
It's funny, I'm still hearing that males are the coercive, violent ones.

00:11:10 Speaker_00
Yes. So it's not an untrue storyline, but there's females like hyenas are a great example of a female that kind of flips that story. So female hyenas are bigger, more aggressive, dominate the society.

00:11:25 Speaker_00
And they also have these giant eight inch long clitorises that work like a pseudo penis. They look exactly like the male's penis. They even have fused labia that look like testicles. Oh, wow. But there's no sperm inside. No, no, no, no.

00:11:42 Speaker_00
It's just the fused labia. It looks like it. And for a long time, actually, scientists really struggled to figure out what was going on with hyenas because they thought there were only males out there.

00:11:53 Speaker_00
But the female genitalia looks remarkably like the male. And they use these pseudopenises in dominance displays, greeting rituals. But it also gives them a very high degree over who's mating with them because

00:12:09 Speaker_00
It's like two socks, I guess, trying to push into each other if they're full, if they don't go in. So basically the female has to allow the male to mate with her.

00:12:22 Speaker_00
It's like I've heard it described as kind of like inverting a sock, like gets pushed and she relaxes it and the penis gets to push in there. Oh, wow. But it gives her full control over what's going on.

00:12:34 Speaker_00
Is there a downside to this amazing... Funny you say that. This amazing control does come at a cost. So they'll urinate through the pseudopenis, they use it in their dominance displays, they mate through it, but they also have to give birth through it.

00:12:53 Speaker_00
And it's been described as pushing a cantaloupe through a garden hose. So it comes at a very high cost. Unclenching, unclenching. Yes, the pup has to rip through the pseudopenis.

00:13:04 Speaker_02
Wow. Okay. After the break, we're going to learn about one creature that has a genital shield. I think it's my favorite, actually. It's coming up. Welcome back. Today on the show, Dr. Tiana Pirtle is walking us through vaginas of the animal kingdom.

00:13:29 Speaker_02
It's really an evolutionary battle between both vaginas and penises, which when you think about evolution, that is how obviously it worked, right? It doesn't really make sense that only one would be evolving.

00:13:44 Speaker_00
Yeah, and also it makes sense that they wouldn't necessarily be evolving in the same direction together always.

00:13:52 Speaker_00
Obviously both males and females want to reproduce, but females have to invest a bit more resources, time and energy into reproduction relative to males.

00:14:04 Speaker_00
And that's where you get the sexual conflict where the males and the females interests don't always align. So, that's why you get some of these wild tactics and different physiology, morphology and behaviors.

00:14:24 Speaker_00
So tell me how the Water Strider accomplishes this. The Water Strider is a great story of kind of sexual conflict, evolutionary arms race in action. So, water strutters are bugs that sit on top of the ponds and water.

00:14:42 Speaker_00
The females have these genital shields. So, and I do have a model of this, but unfortunately didn't make it on the... You can't fly with that sort of weaponry.

00:14:56 Speaker_00
but it she's got her overpositor that sits inside of her abdomen and then the overpositor where the eggs go and if she wants to mate she will push it out and it kind of opens and the male can deliver the sperm.

00:15:14 Speaker_00
But if it's in this position, there's no chance the male gets to mate with her.

00:15:18 Speaker_02
If it's closed up, it's closed.

00:15:20 Speaker_00
So the female has evolved this morphology that gives her full control over who's mating with her. She has full say over who's going to father her offspring. But the males have evolved this counter strategy.

00:15:34 Speaker_00
And historically it would have been described the other way around.

00:15:38 Speaker_01
Oh, of course. Right.

00:15:40 Speaker_00
Generally. But so the male can't mate with FEMA unless she is fully on board. Open for business.

00:15:48 Speaker_00
So the male's response strategy is he will, to use those terms that we said are often describing males, he will threaten her by, he sits on top of her and taps the water and that will alert all the predators. In the water. Right.

00:16:11 Speaker_00
And the predators will come up, and because the female's on the bottom, she has a higher chance of being eaten. So he'll just sit there. She can't fly away because he's sitting on her.

00:16:19 Speaker_00
And he'll just tap, do his little threatening tap dance until she either opens her ovipositor, gets eaten, or they both leave. Wow. What a strategy.

00:16:34 Speaker_00
The insect world is really fascinating when it comes to genitals and insects where the females have the penis, what we would call it's a gynosome, but it would be what we think of as penis. And the male has the receiving organ. Okay. Yes.

00:16:50 Speaker_00
There's many ways to be a male and a female.

00:16:52 Speaker_02
So there's a couple more animals I want to go through. So far we've just been talking about generally one vagina, but there are animals with two.

00:17:03 Speaker_00
Yes. In fact, there are many animals with two. So this is the rattlesnake. So you can see there's two of them. Two vaginas, two uterus. And each one can be fertilized? The males have two pronged penis, the hemipenes. So they use them both at the same time.

00:17:27 Speaker_02
The hemipenes. And either one can shoot out sperm.

00:17:31 Speaker_00
And then they have the two vaginas, two uterus. Do clitoris? Hemiclitoris is what it's called in snakes. Does it give pleasure? And hemipene.

00:17:47 Speaker_00
So there's been remarkably little research about clitorises, which is remarkable because all mammals definitely have one and I'm pretty sure pretty much all vertebrates have one as well.

00:18:00 Speaker_00
And we don't really know what they do for these animals, but presumably they play an important role in reproduction. Because otherwise that's a big lot of wasted energy for evolution.

00:18:12 Speaker_02
So tell me the evolutionary arms race going on with these snakes.

00:18:15 Speaker_00
Okay. Well, so snakes, these rattlesnakes, they reproduce quite slowly. They're long-lived, slow-growing animals. So I believe they don't become sexually mature until they're about 13. Okay. And they also don't produce very many clutches.

00:18:36 Speaker_00
So what these snakes do and a lot of other species in the animal queendom do is they'll store sperm These guys have like a special organ that will store the sperm over winter for years even.

00:18:53 Speaker_00
I believe there's a tortoise or a turtle that stored sperm for four years. And then produce the clutch from it.

00:19:04 Speaker_02
Wow, they've got like a little IVF fridge in there.

00:19:07 Speaker_00
These snakes, they'll go around and mate with the males they come across. They can be quite indiscriminate because they can keep all the sperm they find and deal with it later. That is amazing. They could store it for that long. Yes.

00:19:21 Speaker_00
And then there's some evidence to suggest that snakes, alligators, sharks, all these species that are storing sperm can then select which sperm to use for which clutch.

00:19:35 Speaker_00
And we don't exactly know how they're doing this, but there's quite a complex dialogue happening between the sperm and the vagina environment.

00:19:48 Speaker_02
So the female will mate with a bunch of different males, store the sperm, and then we think when she releases an egg, she'll somehow, using the word choose generously, but she'll somehow be like, all right, well, for this egg, what we really need is this sperm.

00:20:06 Speaker_00
We want this sperm. Well, in the ejaculate, you have quite a diverse range of sperms. This sperm has crappy genetics. We're not going to choose that one. Oh, this one. It's got great receptors on the outside. We're going to help this one go forward.

00:20:22 Speaker_00
Interesting.

00:20:22 Speaker_02
And you'll be the one to fertilize my eggs and that'll increase my baby's chance of survival. Amazing. So clearly some animals have evolved these bells and whistles, these sperm storage facilities. Corkscrews. Corkscrews.

00:20:38 Speaker_01
Vaginal folds. Genital shields. No shade to my vagina or anyone else listening, but it's pretty cut and dry as far as I'm concerned. And the alpaca, not throwing it under the bridge, but like also just kind of looks like a tube.

00:20:53 Speaker_00
Yeah. Why is it? Which, you know, I do still love it though. It's one of my favorites. It's very regal looking, isn't it? It is very regal. It's just like a very long tube. Coincides with a very long, thin penis. I could only imagine.

00:21:07 Speaker_00
This vagina does many amazing things still. Tell me about the alpaca. What's happening here? So this vagina is punctured by a very long penis that has a little hook on the end of it.

00:21:23 Speaker_02
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

00:21:27 Speaker_00
What does the alpaca penis look like? Terrifying. It's long and thin and it has a collagenous hook on the bottom.

00:21:34 Speaker_00
And alpacas are quite unusual in the mammal world in that the, so most penises stay in the vagina, deposit the sperm within the vaginal canal. The cervix will often kind of function as a bit of a

00:21:51 Speaker_00
a quality control checkpoint and the sperm have to make it through the cervix. The trapdoor of the cervix, yes.

00:21:59 Speaker_00
Whereas for these guys, the penis punctures through, the little hook pokes through the cervix and deposits the sperm straight into the uterus. Ooh, okay.

00:22:12 Speaker_02
Does feel efficient. If I'm gunning for the male alpaca, good strategy, I would say. Good work, Evolution.

00:22:21 Speaker_00
And this is potentially because male alpacas are what we call dribble ejaculators. Hello now. Dribble ejaculators. So the ejaculate dribbles out very slowly. So mating can take up to an hour in alpacas. It's like anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes.

00:22:40 Speaker_00
And it happens in a very reclined repose. The female alpaca will sit on the ground. the male will get on top of her and sometimes she'll lay down on her side, have a nap, wait for him to finish his job.

00:22:55 Speaker_00
So other species, the ejaculate comes out with force. Yeah, familiar with those species. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it needs a little bit of force to get through the cervix, whereas I guess if you're dribbling, you might as well put it where it needs to go.

00:23:09 Speaker_00
Of course, that makes sense. I guess this nondescript normal vagina can look the way it does because the female has a high degree of control behaviorally. So if she's not into mating, she'll just stand up and walk away.

00:23:26 Speaker_00
Or if she doesn't want it in the first place, she just won't lay down. So she hasn't necessarily needed to evolve all these fancy bells and whistles to stop sperm from getting to where she doesn't want it to go.

00:23:40 Speaker_02
Because she can just get up and leave. Oh, that's so interesting.

00:23:44 Speaker_02
So we find that in the animals, like to go back to the duck, where it is more forcible and the males are really coercing that sexual behavior, then you have to evolve a vagina that can handle that, that can sneakily- Well, that will give you the final say.

00:23:59 Speaker_02
Right. But with some animals like alpacas, the sort of evolutionary arms race actually comes from the behavior that you can just walk away. I'm done with this dribble.

00:24:10 Speaker_02
So it is interesting, we do often see, as you've talked about at the beginning of the show, we often see sex is this battle where the slutty male is fighting to impregnate.

00:24:20 Speaker_00
But it's never described as slutty for the male. Promiscuous is used for females that mate multiple times, but the male is just multiple matings.

00:24:29 Speaker_02
Oh right, the male just being a male.

00:24:31 Speaker_00
We've had this since Darwin, this very narrow view of what a female should and shouldn't be. Monogamous was the word that Darwin used to describe females. Coy, passive, chaste, loyal, dutiful mothers. But that's not what we see in the animal kingdom.

00:24:51 Speaker_00
Also, we haven't even touched on this, homosexuality and homosexual behaviors in animals. Very common. And there's many different ways to reproduce and be a male and a female in the world. And I think appreciating that diversity in the animal world

00:25:10 Speaker_00
will hopefully help us appreciate that diversity in the human world.

00:25:14 Speaker_02
That's right, where there's so much diversity within species, let alone amongst species.

00:25:19 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah. The patriarchy has had scientific credence for too long from this very narrow view of males and females and reproductions.

00:25:30 Speaker_02
So when you look at all these rainbow vaginas, this rainbow of vaginas, do you have a favorite?

00:25:36 Speaker_00
Can you choose amongst your children? I mean, it's hard. I mean, I do love the alpaca one because it's just very regal. It stands taller than all the rest. But I said, yeah, the duck is one of my favorites as well, just because I love that story.

00:25:56 Speaker_00
of the secret weapon vagina and the female has the last laugh.

00:26:01 Speaker_02
So you have this show, Vaginal Vignettes.

00:26:04 Speaker_00
Vaginal Vignettes? It's had many different names over the years, but this year was the Vaginal Vignettes.

00:26:11 Speaker_02
Vaginal Vignettes, where you showcase all of these amazing vaginas. What's been the best reaction you've gotten so far?

00:26:19 Speaker_00
They've all been the greatest reaction. What do they say about it? People love it. I've had a lot of women come up. I'm so glad to hear this story. It just makes me so much happier to have a vagina myself.

00:26:36 Speaker_01
You made them happier that they had a vagina? That's huge. You are changing lives, Tiana.

00:26:43 Speaker_00
One vagina at a time.

00:26:44 Speaker_01
One vagina at a time.

00:26:45 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's again, gives people insight into how diverse being female is.

00:26:54 Speaker_01
Thank you so much for your time.

00:26:56 Speaker_00
Thank you.

00:26:57 Speaker_02
If you haven't been watching this video, you can find it on Spotify, also on Instagram and TikTok. We're going to put little snippets of this video up so you can see these fabulous model vaginas.

00:27:08 Speaker_02
We're on science underscore vs that's us on Instagram and on TikTok I'm Wendy Zuckerman. So I'm Wendy Zuckerman and I'll talk to you next time.

00:27:16 Speaker_01
You look like you just won the Oscar.

00:27:29 Speaker_00
Thank you, thank you. You don't know how much this means to me.